The Wandering Jew — Complete eBook

[33] Buying penny-worths, like all other purchases
at minute retail, are greatly to the poor man’s
disadvantage.

CHAPTER LII.

Revelations.

During the visit of Angela and Agricola to the Common
Dwelling-house, the band of Wolves, joined upon the
road by many of the haunters of taverns, continued
to march towards the factory, which the hackney-coach,
that brought Rodin from Paris, was also fast approaching.
M. Hardy, on getting out of the carriage with his
friend, M. de Blessac, had entered the parlor of the
house that he occupied next the factory. M. Hardy
was of middle size, with an elegant and slight figure,
which announced a nature essentially nervous and impressionable.
His forehead was broad and open, his complexion pale,
his eyes black, full at once of mildness and penetration,
his countenance honest, intelligent, and attractive.

One word will paint the character of M. Hardy.
His mother had called him her Sensitive Plant.
His was indeed one of those fine and exquisitely delicate
organizations, which are trusting, loving, noble, generous,
but so susceptible, that the least touch makes them
shrink into themselves. If we join to this excessive
sensibility a passionate love for art, a first-rate
intellect, tastes essentially refined, and then think
of the thousand deceptions, and numberless infamies
of which M. Hardy must have been the victim in his
career as a manufacturer, we shall wonder how this
heart, so delicate and tender, had not been broken
a thousand times, in its incessant struggle with merciless
self-interest. M. Hardy had indeed suffered much.
Forced to follow the career of productive industry,
to honor the engagements of his father, a model of
uprightness and probity, who had yet left his affairs
somewhat embarrassed, in consequence of the events
of 1815, he had succeeded, by perseverance and capacity,
in attaining one of the most honorable positions in
the commercial world. But, to arrive at this
point, what ignoble annoyances had he to bear with,
what perfidious opposition to combat, what hateful
rivalries to tire out!

Sensitive as he was, M. Hardy would a thousand times
have fallen a victim to his emotions of painful indignation
against baseness, of bitter disgust at dishonesty,
but for the wise and firm support of his mother.
When he returned to her, after a day of painful struggles
with odious deceptions, he found himself suddenly
transported into an atmosphere of such beneficent
purity, of such radiant serenity, that he lost almost
on the instant the remembrance of the base things
by which he had been so cruelly tortured during the
day; the pangs of his heart were appeased at the mere
contact of her great and lofty soul; and therefore
his love for her resembled idolatry. When he
lost her, he experienced one of those calm, deep sorrows
which have no end—­which become, as it were,
part of life, and have even sometimes their days of